Volunteering Hands, Royalty-free image courtesy of PickPik This is Volunteer Appreciation Month, and we have much to appreciate and celebrate! Officers These are the folks who have stepped up and taken responsibility to support our mission in a multitude of ways. Many of us are part of more than one team, some take on lots of tiny jobs which few notice, unless they don't get done. President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer; all are critical to the health of South King County Genealogical Society.  Out-going President Valorie Zimmerman Vice President Alexis Hacker Booker Secretary Melanie Hinds Treasurer Michele Mattoon Board The Board is made up of the officers and the team leaders who choose to take on more responsibility. In particular, MaryLynn Strickland is the voice for the Membership on the Board, along with her work in the Education team. Thanks to all of you! Education Our pre-eminent duty as a society is education , both of our members and the general public. Th...

Courtesy of PicPick Unknown Unknowns US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously said There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.  The three realms of knowledge which Rumsfeld cited are what we can explore by creating research reports for our ancestors and others such as members of the FAN Club, F amily, Friends, A ssociates and N eighbors. Last Monday, MaryLynn illustrated the value of researching more of the FANs of your ancestors, in The Shot Heard Round The World .  At the beginning of the year, I wrote about my plans for 2025 genealogy research , including research reports for my closest 52 ahnentafals, one every week. I'm a bit behind, and many of the "reports" are just placeholders, I've already found so much. I anticipate that the rest of this year will be full of discoveries of pr...

Battle of Lexington and Concord, from a Public domain scan of the vintage historic postcard by Picryl. By the rude bridge that arched the flood,     Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood,     And fired the shot heard round the world. (1) April 19 is the semiquincentennial, the 250th  Anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the beginning of the Revolutionary War . From our grade school history classes, most of us remember about Paul Revere and his midnight ride to warn the colonists that the British were coming. It was at Lexington and Concord that the first skirmishes occurred and the "shot heard round the world" was fired. When you think about events that happened during an ancestor's lifetime, do you wonder if your ancestor was present at that event?  I do. This was during my fourth great-grandfather Jonah Stow's lifetime and through my early research of his military records, I knew that he wasn...

Courtesy OpenClipArt,  CC0 1.0 Universal The introduction of DNA testing for genealogy was revolutionary. The Sorensen Foundation, NatGeo and other non-profit efforts, along with scientific research yielded books such as Bryan Sykes'  The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry   back in 2001.  But until Family Tree DNA began offering Y and mitochondrial (mt) DNA kits for sale, there was only the crudest information available.  Thanks to Bennett Greenspan of Family Tree DNA, who persisted in finding a way for this important data to be available to genealogists, we now have these wonderful record sets. He and other citizen scientists have persisted; the more we test, the more we know about shared relatives and our deep ancestral history.  The  Human Genome Project helped immensely and scientists of all types continue to deepen our knowledge of not just Y and mitochondrial (mt) DNA, but also autosomal and the more-rare...

  Im age courtesy Unsplash    Online Research – a Book Review I have been reading The Everything Guide to Online Genealogy , by Kimberly Powell. [ 1 ] I hesitated to read the book because the world of online genealogy changes hourly, and I wondered if I would learn anything useful from a book published 17 years ago. I approached it with the idea that much of the information would be out of date, and it is. However, the ideas I can apply to my genealogical research, and suggestions of sources that had not occurred to me have justified the time I have spent reading the book.     Determine Your Goal Even though I have immigrant ancestors, as we all do unless we are indigenous people, I have always been most interested in my ancestors after they came to America. I was surprised to learn that by the time we have worked through 10 generations, we will have discovered more than 1000 direct ancestors. [2 ]  Whenever I am tempted to “jump across the pond”,...

In honor of Women's History Month and each of the brave, generous, tenacious women described:  Barb and Bob, Ted and Lola: Loss, war, love and enduring friendship .   The story begins at the meeting place: 4711 Meridian Avenue, Seattle .  4711 Meridian Avenue, Seattle, Courtesy of Google Maps Four families and a l egacy of connection What seems like chance—the convergence of four young lives in one small house in Seattle—created bonds that would last lifetimes. The story of Bob and Barb, Ted and Lola reminds us how seemingly random moments can shape generations, including the author's very existence. The Meeting Place: 4711 Meridian  The story begins in a modest house in Seattle, owned by Mary Shutt, a woman who had already weathered more than her share of grief. Living with her was her daughter Barbara Jean, known to everyone as "Barb," a bright Lincoln High student with her whole life ahead of her. The Foundation: Mary's Journey Mary Reese was born in Indiana i...

Generated by CoPilot 16 March 2025 Why Preserve Stories? Have you ever casually said, “when I did . ..” and your children looked at you and said, “Huh? you did what?”  When this happens to you, it is time to record the story. Thirty or 100 years from now, that story will mean much more to your descendants than any family tree you create. Inland Empire Students at Music Sessions, The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, 24 July 1949, p. 24, col. 2-3. If you think, “Someday, I will write a family history,” but you go right back to researching the marriage date of third Cousin Mary Missing, within five minutes the incident will have flitted from your mind. Kevin Kelly admonishes us to write down the idea within five minutes before it is gone. My list of experiences, events, and incidents is getting really long, so I have decided to get started so that my descendants will have SOMETHING. The summer of 1949, my mother attended a short course at the University of Washington to prepare her ...